1. Field of Disclosure
This disclosure relates generally to natural language understanding and more particularly to inferring attributes of a recipe.
2. Description of the Related Art
Although recipes are available from many sources (e.g., the Internet), such recipes do not have a standard format and may omit various characteristics of a recipe such as the difficulty of preparing the recipe. A recipe's difficulty is a relevant attribute for recipe readers, who may choose to avoid a recipe with a difficulty beyond a reader's skill level. Other readers may seek more difficult recipes to develop cooking skills.
Some recipes have associated metadata indicating recipe attributes. For example, a header of a HyperText Markup Language (HTML) page describing a recipe includes metadata tags indicating a recipe's difficulty. Unfortunately, such metadata is available only for a subset of recipes, and even those recipes with metadata often do not include metadata indicating recipe difficulty. Other recipes may include explanations indicating the author's opinion on the recipe's difficulty. These comments may be difficult to efficiently interpret through an automated process given many possible ways of expressing that a recipe is easy or difficult.
Even if a recipe indicates whether a recipe's author (or a recipe collection's editor) considers the recipe easy or difficult, this classification is subjective. The cooking skill and experience of different recipe authors vary, so recipes designated as easy by a skilled recipe author may be difficult for an inexperienced cook. For example, an “easy” recipe from Modernist Cuisine may be intractably difficult for a typical cook without access to a centrifuge or a rotary evaporator. Hence, author-designated recipe difficulties may be inaccurate whether included in metadata of a recipe or in explanatory text accompanying a recipe.